It is a pity that Lovecraft made no efforts to prepare The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for publication, even when book publishers in the 1930s were specifically asking for a novel from his pen; but we are in no position to question Lovecraft’s own judgment that the novel was an inferior piece of work, a ‘cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism’.6 It has now been acknowledged as one of his finest works, and it emphasizes the message of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath all over again: Lovecraft is who he is because of his birth and upbringing as a New England Yankee. The need to root his work in his native soil became more and more clear to him as time went on, and it led to his gradual transformation of all New England as the locus of both wonder and terror.
The last tale of Lovecraft’s great spate of fiction-writing of 1926–27 is ‘The Colour out of Space’, written in March 1927. It is unquestionably one of his great tales, and it always remained Lovecraft’s own favourite. Here again the plot is too well known to require lengthy description, and focuses on the horrifying effects of a meteorite—or, more specifically, the nebulous entity or entities within the meteorite—after it lands upon a New England farmer’s field. Crops grow strangely, animals develop anatomical abnormalities, and finally both humans and animals alike crumble into a greyish dust. At the end there is a tremendous eruption of light from a welclass="underline" the creatures have returned to their cosmic home.
Lovecraft was correct in calling this tale an ‘atmospheric study’,7 for he has rarely captured the atmosphere of inexplicable horror better than he has here. First let us consider the setting. The reservoir mentioned in the tale is a very real one: the Quabbin Reservoir, plans for which were announced in 1926, although it was not completed until 1939. And yet Lovecraft declares in a late letter that it was not this reservoir but the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island (built in 1926) that caused him to use the reservoir element in the story.8 He saw this reservoir when he passed through this area in the west-central part of the state on the way to Foster in late October. I cannot, however, believe that Lovecraft was not also thinking of the Quabbin, which is located exactly in the area of central Massachusetts where the tale takes place, and which involved the abandonment and submersion of entire towns in the region.
The key to the story, of course, is the anomalous meteorite. Is it—or are the coloured globules inside it—animate in any sense we can recognize? Does it house a single entity or many entities? What are their physical properties? More significantly, what are their aims, goals, and motives? The fact that we can answer none of these questions very clearly is by no means a failing; indeed, this is exactly the source of terror in the tale. As Lovecraft said of Machen’s ‘The White People’, ‘the lack of anything concrete is the great asset of the story’.9 In other words, it is precisely our inability to define the nature—either physical or psychological—of the entities in ‘The Colour out of Space’ (or even know whether they are entities or living creatures as we understand them) that produces the sense of nameless horror.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the tale is the mundane matter of its publication history. ‘The Colour out of Space’ appeared in Amazing Stories for September 1927; but the critical question is whether the tale was ever submitted to Weird Tales. Although Sam Moskowitz claimed that it was submitted both there and to the Argosy, no documentary evidence has emerged to support the contention. Consider also Lovecraft’s comment to Farnsworth Wright in his letter of 5 July 1927: ‘this spring and summer I’ve been too busy with revisory and kindred activities to write more than one tale—which, oddly enough, was accepted at once by Amazing Stories’.10 The wording of this letter suggests that this is Lovecraft’s first mention of the story to Wright. There is equal silence concerning a possible Argosy rejection.
But if Lovecraft was hoping that in Amazing Stories—the first authentic science fiction magazine in English—he had found an alternative to Weird Tales, he was in for a rude awakening. Although his later work contained a fairly significant scientific element, Amazing became a closed market to him when Hugo Gernsback paid him only $25.00 for the story—a mere one-fifth of a cent per word—and this only after three dunning letters. Although in later years Lovecraft briefly considered requests from Gernsback or from his associate editor, C. A. Brandt, for further submissions, he never again sent a tale to Amazing. He also took to calling Gernsback ‘Hugo the Rat’.
Just before writing ‘The Colour out of Space’, Lovecraft had to hurry up and type ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, since Cook wished it immediately for the Recluse. Lovecraft had been making random additions to the essay based upon recent readings—including the subtle and atmospheric tales of Walter de la Mare—but Cook’s rush order compelled him to type up the essay without any further enlargements. Even this, however, was not quite the end. Late in March, after Cook had sent Lovecraft the first proofs, Donald Wandrei lent F. Marion Crawford’s superb posthumous collection of horror tales, Wandering Ghosts (1911), to Lovecraft, while in April Lovecraft borrowed Robert W. Chambers’s early collection The King in Yellow (1895) from Cook; he was so taken with these works that he added paragraphs on both writers in the page proofs.
The Recluse appeared in August 1927; although initially planned as a quarterly, this was the only issue ever published. Although not strictly a weird publication, it contains fine work by Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, H. Warner Munn, Frank Belknap Long, and Samuel Loveman. Cook wished to send The Recluse to certain ‘celebrities’, in particular to all four of Lovecraft’s ‘modern masters’, Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M. R. James. As it happened, the issue did find its way to some of these figures, and their responses to Lovecraft’s essay are of interest. James rather unkindly declared in a letter that Lovecraft’s style ‘is of the most offensive’, but goes on to remark: ‘But he has taken pains to search about & treat the subject from its beginning to MRJ, to whom he devotes several columns.’11 Machen’s response can be gauged only from Donald Wandrei’s comment to Lovecraft: ‘I received a letter to-day from Machen, in which he mentioned your article and its hold on him.’12 Copies were also apparently sent to Blackwood, Dunsany, Rudyard Kipling, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and several others.
As early as April 1927 Lovecraft already had a vague idea of expanding ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ for a putative second edition, and Cook occasionally mentioned the possibility of issuing such an edition separately as a monograph. Lovecraft set up a section in his commonplace book entitled ‘Books to mention in new edition of weird article’, listing several works he read in the subsequent months and years; but Cook’s physical and financial collapse confounded, or at least delayed, the plans, and the second edition did not materialize until 1933, and in a form very different from what Lovecraft envisioned.